"The federal agents were armed with a warrant allowing them to seize property belonging to the company as part of a criminal investigation—and even though the warrant explicitly exempted the safe deposit boxes in the company's vaults, they were taken too. More than 800 were seized."
Whether the warrant should have been issued is one debate worth having. But the other problem is that the FBI didn't even follow the terms of the warrant.
If law enforcement (at every level) won't follow the law even in procedural matters, we're 100x worse off than most people thought.
A thoughtful person will also ask: "Wait, when did the FBI begin undertaking clearly illegal activity? What other investigations have been tainted as a result?"
> A thoughtful person will also ask: "Wait, when did the FBI begin undertaking clearly illegal activity? What other investigations have been tainted as a result?"
I don't think this matters at all. The FBI has been rife with controversy[1] and legally dubious actions[2] since just about their founding. Despite this, it's well out of the mainstream to ask if the FBI should exist and very few question whether people convicted by the FBI are actually guilty.
No matter how desperate I am for heart surgery, I won't go to the surgeon who kills all his patients.
The very first director of the FBI was J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI as a lawless private army for literally fifty years.
And there has been really no systematic reform since.
Systematically corrupt law enforcement is worse than no law enforcement at all.
Systemically broken organizations are unfixable, particular ones that have been broken for over a century.
If the US really needs the law enforcement that the FBI is supposed to provide and mostly doesn't, they should set up a new, non-corrupt, competent organization to do it, and fire everyone in the FBI.
They won't, of course. Accountability is not any sort of value in US government.
"If you assumed that the FBI got completely off the hook for this Ferrari F50 crash, you’d be correct. According to Jalopnik, Motors Insurance decided to file a lawsuit to recover $750,000, the F50’s market value at the time. However, the U.S. Department of Justice reportedly denied the claim and decided that the insurance company was not entitled to any payment."
This is not an honest reading of the article, which itself is of course slanted.
The warrant allowed the "nests" of boxes to be siezed, but not their contents.
However, the government is supposed to safeguard items that are innocently affected by a seizure.
So instead of simply dumping the contents on the floor of the vault and leaving the building unattended and unguarded they inventoried the box contents and stored them. They provided a mechanism, which the article notes is somewhat suspect in its underlying effect, for owners to identify their property and retrieve it.
This is basically a dispute about how the government can best respect the rights of "innocent" vault owners while still carrying out their duty under the warrant and established rules. It's not about the government stealing people's property. It's about whether the box holders should have to identify themselves to obtain the contents.
As the article notes, at least one box had the name and contact information of the owner on the top. It's not clear if they all were marked similarly, but that is one instance where there was no need for the FBI to open the box at all. They simply could've returned the locked box to its owner, as they had no legal authority to do anything else.
The government has no duty to go to lengths to seek out prospective owners and deliver property to them.
They post a notice at the site of the warrant and anyone with an interest goes to them.
Since the owners allege that they put their name and contact information on that box, we can presume they would have no qualms about providing same, and a description of the contents, to the custodian of the property to claim it.
> The government has no duty to go to lengths to seek out prospective owners and deliver property to them.
Can you explain why the government has no duty to treat its law-abiding citizens in an honest and open fashion?
Six weeks later, apparently they don't have the contents back. Searching you can find many similar cases where people simply never get their stuff back.
What sort of procedures are there to safeguard innocent people? Are there two people present at all times to prevent a single person from just taking things? Is there an inventory of each box taken at the start and checked at the end?
Government works for the people. They aren't kings or dictators. We are innocent until proven guilty. If they can't investigate _suspects_ without fucking up _perfectly innocent people_ then they shouldn't do it at all.
Requiring a description of the contents would be abusing the warrant to gain access to information the warrant didn't cover. All they should need to claim their property is proof of their identity as the owner of the safe deposit box, including the key to the box. At that point they should be granted access to the box in private so that they can remove their property, just as if they were claiming it from the original custodian. The FBI definitely should not be opening the boxes themselves or attempting to inventory their contents.
It's actually worse than that. Assuming you do have something illegal in those boxes, they've pulled a legal maneuver whereby you are forced to claim ownership. It's an end-run around the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination. They seized your property and require you to incriminate yourself to get it back.
Lockboxes where the contents are legal will presumably be claimed by their owners, unless the contents are somehow embarrassing. Illegal lockboxes won't be claimed, and the FBI has effectively seized them without needing a warrant for the contents.
I'll be surprised if the FBI wins this in court, but it won't make any difference. This will take years to hash out, and by the time it's done, all the legal lockboxes will have already been claimed. The illegal ones are presumably anonymous, and the FBI will just say "oh well, if they won't claim it then we don't know whose it is, so I guess it's ours".
> This is not an honest reading of the article, which itself is of course slanted.
> The warrant allowed the "nests" of boxes to be siezed, but not their contents.
By omitting the part of the article that very clearly discusses this aspect, just one sentence below that, I put it to you that you are the dishonest one here.
"In court filings, however, Gluck and other attorneys representing anonymous plaintiffs argue that the seizure of the nests "does not appear to be the government's true purpose here."
"A reasonable person could easily conclude that taking and searching the contents of the boxes was the true purpose of the USPV seizure, not just an unintended but unavoidable byproduct as the government seeks to portray and justify it," they write.
Do they think we are stupid? "We want to seize these useless shelves, because we don't have the legal authority to search the boxes. Oh, now we've moved the shelves, we get to look into the boxes! What a surprise!"
They got a subpoena for something with _no informational value_ because they knew they could _abuse_ the law to look into and take things they had no right to take.
"They provided a mechanism, which the article notes is somewhat suspect in its underlying effect, for owners to identify their property"
This is clearly referring to the text you quote. I assume readers have read the actual article.
So, since I clearly included reference to the information you are incensed about, who is it that is doing a dishonest reading here? You have misleadingly claimed I didn't include the reference.
> Various chain emails over the past seven years have warned readers about the possibility of Homeland Security seizing items like gold, silver and guns from their safe deposit boxes at the bank. This isn’t possible without first obtaining a search warrant, since those boxes are private property. And banking officials told us random seizures just aren’t happening. We rate this statement Pants on Fire.
Perhaps it's still just a conspiracy theory with respect to the DHS rather than the FBI. It doesn't seem to be out of line with civil asset forfeiture policy, other than it being from safe deposit boxes rather than vehicles or luggage.
> Law enforcement took more stuff from people than burglars did last year (2015)
I'm not sure how chain-email debunking DHS seizures pertains to this specific case in the OP where hundreds of safety deposit boxes we seized by the FBI and there is an ongoing case over it. Fact checking blogs are notorious for selecting multiple variations of a rumor and "fact-checking" the low hanging fruit, then treating all other variants as satisfactorily debunked.
>"What the government has done here is completely backward," writes Frommer. "The government cannot search every apartment in a building because the landlord is involved in a crime. After all, when somebody rents an apartment, that apartment is theirs."
>"What the government has done here is completely backward," writes Frommer. "The government cannot search every apartment in a building because the landlord is involved in a crime. After all, when somebody rents an apartment, that apartment is theirs."
I disagree. Let's say you "rented" a room at a crackhouse. The house later gets seized and your stack of cash is seized. Is it reasonable to show up to the police station and say "yeah that's my cash, no it wasn't involved in anything illegal, can I have it back?"
> Let's say you "rented" a room at a crackhouse. The house later gets seized and your stack of cash is seized. Is it reasonable to show up to the police station and say "yeah that's my cash, no it wasn't involved in anything illegal, can I have it back?"
It's not reasonable because the government and society have created an environment and system that has no incentive or obligation to return the property. Unless you are a part of the system (LEO, lawyer, judge, etc) your words are worthless. You are essentially a second class citizen.
Edit: clarifying since I'm being downvoted... it should be reasonable but the way our system is currently "working" makes it unreasonable because the system will just ignore you. Hell, if you annoy them, they might find a reason to harass you more.
So they should be considered guilty until proven innocent? By this logic, the FBI should be allowed to seize a bank and every bank account holder would need to prove where each penny came from.
That's basically how civil asset seizure works in practice. Technically they charge the asset and not the person, because they know the person has rights and could defend themselves. Somehow they got the courts to agree to allowing the asset to be the subject without extending any of the rights (like to representation) being extended to it.
that was not the premise hat's being discussed! it was about a room being rented in a crack house. good luck getting your money if you don't have that source of revenue declared somewhere.
You can see an example of a search warrant in the link below. It specifically outlines the properties to be searched. If someone had multiple warehouses in question, I assume they would have to be individually listed.
There are likely RICO type laws that could be applied which would allow seizing everything in a warehouse no matter who is "renting" the individual units.
I'd kinda argue this article is a refutation of the fact check. If a rumor went around that the CIA is putting hidden cameras in random people's bedrooms, and it turned out that the NSA was putting hidden cameras in imprecisely-selected people's bedrooms, no way is that "pants on fire".
And banking officials told us random seizures just aren’t happening.
Regardless if it happens or not, that is the single stupidest statement for anyone to show as proof. Of course the bank is going to say their service is secure and nothing bad ever happens. That is basically Apple's response to "touch disease" back in the day. If you are going to call yourself a fact checking site, you need to do some actual fact checking.
In the 1700s a group of people got really upset that another group of people kept taking their things without asking - they had a motto 'no taxation without representation.'
That group then founded a culture around this odd distrust of monarchs, that in later generations became a distrust of governments in all forms - even going as far as to conjure fantastical secret societies like the 'illuminati' that maintain a strong thumb on the scales of justice.
It's just a part of the psyche that built the U.S.A. - it's a feature, not a bug
For accuracy, please note that those people were more upset that the king exempted a company he had a stake in from that taxation (East India Tea Company), mostly in order to make up for some disaterous business dealings that threatened to los him and his friends a lot of money.
Much of the rhetoric was dressed up as against taxes, but really all of the actual action was against unfairness in government (especially the lack of taxes). A worthy goal, and a decent reason to revolt. But I wish current politics would occasionally get the facts right.
The popular, incorrect, narrative taught in schools also conveniently avoids introducing the concept of corruption via preferential treatment. I doubt there was a concerted effort in regards to that, but as a child I remember internalizing a concept of “we should resist external government force”, instead of the more apropos, “we have a duty to protest government corruption.”
I'm not so sure that 'corect' lesson is lost in schools, it sounds more like “we should resist external government force” is just a short cut of 'absolute power corrupts absolutely.'
Because it's corrupt and police departments use it as a funding mechanism (without having to prove guilt). It costs more money to get your cash/assets back than the cash/assets are actually worth in most cases.
In other words, if you have $500 in cash, the police can say, "I suspect that is being used in a drug deal," with no actual evidence, and they take your $500. It will cost you around $2500 in attorney fees to try to get it back. The federal government also gets a cut. In 2010, this accounted for about 2.5 billion dollars in revenue, no trial required.
"Civil forfeiture in the United States, also called civil asset forfeiture or civil judicial forfeiture,[1] is a process in which law enforcement officers take assets from persons suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing."
I'm surprised you haven't heard about this. It's been going on for decades.
I believe there needs to be reform of civil forfeiture as much as the next guy, but I find it funny that 2010 is always the year used when a specific annual amount is cited. That year includes the forfeiture of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme money which alone makes up some 20%-30% of that annual number. Also there aren't going to be a lot of people defending Madoff's right to the money that was taken through civil forfeiture. It is therefore a little misleading to use that specific year to instill fear about the practice without acknowledging that it is somewhat an outlier and that maybe there are valid uses for the practice.
>...but I find it funny that 2010 is always the year used when a specific annual amount is cited. That year includes the forfeiture of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme money which alone makes up some 20%-30% of that annual number.
No, civil asset forfeiture is an ongoing problem and 2010 is not some unusual outlier.
As the original article states:
>...Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary.
>...Since 2000, states and the federal government have forfeited at least $68.8 billion—that we know of. Not all states provided full data, so this figure drastically undercounts property taken from people through forfeiture.
I didn't say it wasn't a problem, but 2010 is always chosen specifically because of Madoff. Madoff also shows why that burglary comparison is meaningless. There is a long tail to civil forfeitures. You can have forfeitures measured in 9 figures and Madoff's is not the only example of this. There are almost never any burglaries of that value. Also burglaries are basically never justified, but sometimes civil forfeitures are justified. Therefore the total money taken is a worthless metric to compare between burglaries and civil forfeitures.
And to reiterate, I agree with you that there needs to be changes to civil forfeiture. I just think we should be honest about the numbers and reasoning we use in that debate.
>...I didn't say it wasn't a problem, but 2010 is always chosen specifically because of Madoff. Madoff also shows why that burglary comparison is meaningless.
The article addresses this issue:
>..."In a given year, one or two high-dollar cases may produce unusually large amounts of money — with a portion going back to victims — thereby telling a noisy story of year-to-year activity levels," the Institute for Justice explains. A big chunk of that 2014 deposit, for instance, was the $1.7 billion Bernie Madoff judgment, most of which flowed back to the victims.
>For that reason, the net assets of the funds are usually seen as a more stable indicator — those numbers show how much money is left over in the funds each year after the federal government takes care of various obligations, like payments to victims. Since this number can reflect monies taken over multiple calendar years, it's less comparable to the annual burglary statistics.
Still, even this more stable indicator hit $4.5 billion in 2014, according to the Institute for Justice — higher again than the burglary losses that year.
>...Also burglaries are basically never justified, but sometimes civil forfeitures are justified.
Criminal forfeitures are done after someone has been convicted and are justified. Civil forfeitures on the other hand are done before anyone has been convicted and the victim doesn't get free legal representation and is assumed guilty until proven innocent. Police agencies have to be funded, but it shouldn't be done by stealing from the public.
That $4.5 number is completely worthless as a comparison to burglaries. It is just the number in the fund at the end of the year. You are basically trying to assume a person's income based off the money in their checking account. It is nonsensical.
I have said elsewhere in this thread that the burden of proof shouldn't be on the owner to prove innocence, but I'm not sure simply changing that turns it into criminal forfeiture. My understanding is that criminal forfeiture only happens when the owner is convicted of a crime. Meanwhile civil forfeiture can happen when the crime is committed by someone else (technically the item being forfeited).
Back to the Madoff example, not all of the money was taken from Madoff directly. Other people benefited from Madoff's crimes without being aware that crimes were being committed. I think it is acceptable for that third party profit to be forfeited despite the owners not committing a crime.
>...That $4.5 number is completely worthless as a comparison to burglaries.
It gives a sense of the scale of the abuse. A number of states refused to give out the data, so it is a low estimate.
>...My understanding is that criminal forfeiture only happens when the owner is convicted of a crime.
Yes, and that is justifiable. Abuses like confiscating a person's money because they went on a domestic airline flight with a large amount of cash are not justifiable.
>...Back to the Madoff example, not all of the money was taken from Madoff directly.
It is a mistake to just focus on a large forfeiture as that is rare:
>...Data from 21 states show half of all currency forfeitures are worth less than $1,300, hardly the stuff of vast criminal enterprises and far less than it would cost to hire an attorney to fight back.
> I believe there needs to be reform of civil forfeiture as much as the next guy
If by "reform" you mean "complete elimination", then I agree.
Civil forfeiture is such a clear and obvious violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. How it lasted more than even a few DAYS before being struck down by even the lowest level courts is beyond me.
My first change would be to shift the burden of proof. Right now civil forfeiture includes a presumption of guilt. Switch that to a presumption of innocence and many of these problems would go away. That presumption of guilt is somewhat central to the civil forfeiture process, so whether this a a "reform" or "complete elimination" is a semantic debate. There are certainly some instances in which the forfeiture is just. The previous mentioned Madoff case is one example.
Civil forfeiture has its origins in customs law where a ship transporting contraband would be seized along with its contents. This was because in the 1600's to 1800's it wasn't feasible to track down and punish the owners of the goods/ship in a foreign country assuming you could even figure that out.
Of course the practice got expanded to contexts and situations that have nothing to do with smuggling because government will use any excuse to expand its powers.
I said I wanted civil forfeiture reform. However being morally right doesn't justify fudging the numbers. If the number is 50% or 90% lower and that weakens our point, so be it.
If you look at the wikipedia article you'll notice a graph about the equitable sharing agreement. This is an agreement that the federal government has with state and local police where anything seized is shared with the federal government. Madoff's seizer wouldn't be included in that number I wouldn't think, but if it was, 2010 was only slightly higher than 2007, 2008 and 2009.
So the 2010 thing is just a coincidence and either isn't included in the equitable sharing agreement, or if it is, it shows the Madoff seizure is just a drop in the bucket. Either way, it's pretty bad.
The easy fix for civil forfeiture is assign the burden of proof to the state, not the citizen. Some states have done this very thing.
>Carl J. Shapiro and various related people and entities have agreed to forfeit $625 million to the United States, all of which will be made available to the victims of the fraudulent investment advisory business which was owned and operated by Bernard L. Madoff
It wouldn't surprise me if the other way around happens too. Quite a lot of people started off trusting their government by default; that's what public schools mostly teach after all. But when people witness these injustices again and again year after year, is it any wonder that some people will decide to throw the baby out with the bathwater?
It happened to me (an illegal search that violated my 4th amendment rights). I have family who are cops and I believe be genuinely great people. However if only 5% of cops are dirty that's still a lot of people who can shoot you in the face and most likely get away with it.
Similar scenario for me. I told one friend who is a trooper about it, and they said this other guy sounds like a bad cop. I literally found blatant mistakes and misconduct with everyone we dealt with as part of the system (police, magistrates, judges, DA's office, clerks, etc).
Please read the article you linked.
"forfeiture" has surpassed burglary; and most of that is criminal forfeiture, after a conviction, returning stolen property or paying a fine. The biggest single chunk is what Bernie Madoff stole.
Here's the conclusion of the article after reviewing those details, including Madoff:
"Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary. "
The implication that the author wants to make is that the cops are worse than the criminals, and that's the conclusion most people will make on first reading of it. However, after further inspection that's totally acceptable, because cops mostly (?) go after bad people, whereas criminals mostly go after innocent people. It's like saying "police are responsible for more kidnappings (aka. arrests) than criminals". Technically true, but misleading.
Not really, they just want you to realize what a scam it is and that cops/feds are stealing from people for no reason other than personal and departmental gains to flex their power. It's rather common in certain states. Along with basically illegal search by K9 cops on false triggers of vehicles. This happened to me in Texas. I refused them searching my car (had a brake light out), the cop got in a huff, said I had to wait until they brought a k9 out (thought he "smelled marijuana"). Full disclosure, I've never smoked pot or done any narcotic of any kind but I did have a pot brownie in college once. They search my car, the dog "triggered on something" and found absolutely zero as I knew they would (although I was a bit afraid it would be dirty cops who'd drop a dime bag somewhere). It was a complete waste of time and I'm pretty sure the cop set it all up because he was bored and I didn't submit to a voluntary search. This turned me a pretty big supporter of the cops into someone who realize they really need to be reigned in from their current fascist/military mentality.
At first I think, "this approach is playing roulette with a revolver," but on second thought if the cop was dirty they'd "find" something regardless of path. If you have the time the civic exercise of constitutional prerogatives is undoubtably as worthwhile and interesting as jury duty or voting.
The below linked incident exposed a broad conspiracy to arrest and jail people with a primary purpose of padding overtime timesheets. The city and former chief continue the coverup to this day.
> said I had to wait until they brought a k9 out (thought he "smelled marijuana")
You know what really blows my mind? Is that in some states, possession of merely a dimebag of weed can get you a prison sentence and that "smelling marijuana" is used as a justification for bringing out the drug dog.
Meanwhile, in Oregon, I literally have an ad for a weed shop on the back of my grocery store receipt. Proof: https://imgur.com/gallery/b1sicuL
ikr! I wasn’t born here and when I tell my friends US police forces are better equipped than my home country’s military they just give me a stare as if it’s normal and blame it on the 2nd amendment that most cops have to carry body armor and deadly force weapons. Sounds so backwards to me, something I’d expect in Somalia and not Redmond, Washington.
I don't see the problem being with them having those tools. I see the problem being how the system doesnt provide correct/adequate training and turns a blind eye when those tools are misused. There needs to be accountability.
I quite strongly believe in the saying "When all one has a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
I definitely see this in Tech, so it likely happens in policing as well - where they're given ever so forceful tools, they'll find reasons to justify that cost.
They aren't only given "hammers". They have an array of tools at their disposal. There are some cops who don't have the training or the capacity (standards are pretty low) to effectively use the correct tool, like that cop that thought she was using a taser. But countless others are able to correctly choose and use the right tool for the job.
To say "the police go after criminals" is overly simplistic. They go after those who they are allowed to and that group of people changes from administration to administration making the police a political hammer and we are all the nails.
Further when the police target you there is zero recourse you can take to resolve the harassment, when your neighbor does it there are many avenues. I would 100% rather be beat by my neighbor than my police.
Where do you get the idea that criminals target innocent people? The few statistics I have seen indicate criminals tend to target other criminals because they are less likely to go to the police if a crime is committed against them.
> However, after further inspection that's totally acceptable, because cops mostly (?) go after bad people,
So let's sum it up. You agree that the cops can seize property without any evidence and require the original owner to get a lawyer prove they are innocent before they get their property back.
You believe the idea of "guilty until proven innocent" is unimportant, because the police are mostly going after bad people.
And it doesn't bother you that the police departments actually get to keep the stuff their seize. You don't see any possible conflict of interest when the police departments can just seize property and keep it and never present any proof at all unless the person they confiscated it from spends a lot of money on legal assistance, and often not even then.
To me this reads like some dysfunctional dystopia, but then I find strongly authoritarian societies frightening.
If you own your home, there are a great many places to hide valuables that are unlikely to be found by an average burglar. If you're being targeted by a sophisticated burglar, you've probably got other problems, anyway.
Garden beds, somewhere in your crawlspace, beneath a compost pile, etc are all fine places to stash things.
It might be time to go back the good ol' days of treasure maps (only half joking).
Me, personally, my wealth is in the my wood scrap storage in the loft of my shop. Great returns on investments this year alone!!! Cash under the mattress is now antiquated. It's all about lumber, baby.
My wealth is buried in a field on my property. Gold, diamonds, cash! It's spread out in a configuration similar to where you would put piping for lawn sprinklers. Email me for a schematic and hours that I will not be home.
Just don't stash things in your oven (unless it really can't heat up). One might think it's great because it's heat resistant, and a burglar is unlikely to open it, and that's true; but, there's a non-zero chance of a guest turning it on with the intent of baking something, without checking if it's empty.
My mom actually bought a new laptop, stashed it in the oven to go to the dentist (the laptop was 1 day old!), got home, and turned oven on to cook something.
similarly, don't hide stuff in the freezer - it seems like a clever place that nobody will think to look in, but everybody else has had the same thought & it's one of the first places anyone even remotely experienced will search
They are protection against a wrench attack. If I had valuables in my house somebody could point a gun at me and I'd probably hand them over, but they can't do that if they're in a guarded safe downtown.
Or bury things 20 feet down. [1] [2] Seal the items in a tube surrounded by AirCrete to avoid detection and water damage. Cut a notch to remind you where to cut the container open safely.
As someone else mentioned, the civil asset forfeiture has surpassed burglary. With that continuing to increase, it might actually be statistically safer to keep it under your bed than at the bank's safety deposit. I guess it depends on a deeper analysis, but with just that info it starts to become comparable.
>With that continuing to increase, it might actually be statistically safer to keep it under your bed than at the bank's safety deposit.
Whether that's true would depend on the false positive rate of civil forfeitures. Even if it's some absurdly high number (eg. 50%), you'd still need 2x as much civil forfeitures than burglaries for the risk to be equal (presumably nobody "deserves" a burglary). Also in theory civil forfeitures can be recovered, if you can provide documentation that the items aren't ill gotten gains. I'm not sure what the recovery rate for burglary is, but I'd imagine that P(assets recovered from civil forfeiture|you are innocent) is much greater than P(assets recovered from burglary).
> Even if it's some hilariously high number (eg. 50%)
It's plausibly even higher than that. The incentive for civil asset forfeitures is for law enforcement to seize in exactly this sort of "a medium amount of money from a large number of people" type of situation. Because it makes this useless:
> Also in theory civil forfeitures can be recovered
"I got back my $9000 and all I had to do was pay $25,000 to a lawyer."
And when people do the math on that and decide not to pursue it, law enforcement gets to keep the money. Hence the incentive for them to do it.
> if you can provide documentation that the items aren't ill gotten gains
This is just absolutely bonkers.
"Innocent until proven guilty" was supposed to be a core tenet of our justice system.
The court needs to prove that the money was acquired illegally, not assume it was, and then expect us to prove its innocence. They need to have evidence and a warrant before seizing.
The "Second Amendment" types often claim that the Second Amendment protects the First Amendment. Well shouldn't it also enforce the Fourth Amendment?
Public discussion (in favor) of applying 2A rights against 4A violations is utterly outside the Overton Window.
As a practical matter, if one were to respond to a 4A violation with a 2A application, the 4A violators respond immediately with overwhelming force, after which you don't get to tell your story, and the violators get to write the report. Victors, history, etc.
> Also in theory civil forfeitures can be recovered,
In theory. It will cost you a shitton of lawyer fees that might exceed the amount you lost, and you can also expect to be constantly harassed by the cops during and after the process, plus forget about ever getting help from them again if you need it.
I would say civil forfeiture is nearly 90+ % false...
If it was a legit use of government power they would go for the better, more ethical criminal forfeiture where by they prove a person committed a crime and then take the assets related to the crime
Civil Asset forfeitures are an end run around the 4th and 5th amendments, and should be viewed as unethical by every reasonable person
It also depends on where you live. Some places have higher rates of burglary than the average, and some much lower. A wealthy individual may have a higher chance of asset seizure, but less for burglary. But again, depends very much on your particular risk profile.
Civil Asset forfeiture also includes things like when Bernie Madoffs assets were seized and sent back to the investors which was $1.7 billion listed in an article on another person's comment. So it's not 100% comprised of "honest" citizens just getting screwed.
The terms are confused a lot, but "Assert Forfeiture" includes seizing assets from Madoff. "Civil Asset Forfeiture" is the Really Bad kind people complain about.
Only "Assert Forfeiture" overall is a larger volume than theft, because yes it includes recuperation from white-collar crime. The money from civil kind is much smaller (not that it excuses it).
This is absolutely false.
"forfeiture" has surpassed burglary; and most of that is criminal forfeiture, after a conviction, returning stolen property or paying a fine. The biggest single chunk is what Bernie Madoff stole.
If you own your own home it would be pretty trivial to hide something that wouldn't get noticed in most burglaries. The average burglary is 10 minutes.
They aren't digging into insulation in your attic or going through multiple boxes of kids clothes in your basement.
I imagine most safes get burgled because their owner can't keep their mouth shut.
> You're trading one threat (negligence on the part of the bank) for another (your home getting robbed/burgled).
Only one of these are you in any control over.
Banks are also bigger targets. Bank robber Willie Sutton was famously asked why he robbed banks. "Because that's where the money is," he said. That's the problem with putting all the valuables together in one place.
Meanwhile you can't so easily get your stuff caught up in some robbery or "investigation" of somebody you have nothing to do with.
I agree that under your bed in a lockbox is a rather poor choice, especially since not only are those boxes are usually not difficult to open without a key and they offer next to no real fire protection for any useful amount of time that would make difference.
Maybe the reply was just imprecise, but the sentiment seems to still be valid in that hiding your vault in your home/on your property somehow is surely more secure in many cases and circumstances, especially in this time where it should be clear to essentially everyone that fundamental rights once accepted as universal and violations of them harshly punished, are now being essentially totally ignored and even nullified through various legal and legislative gaslighting; civil asset forfeiture being of course only the most commonly known perversion of the most basic and fundamental concepts of civilization and basic logic.
Entirely depends on which is more likely, which probably depends a lot on where you live. No such thing as perfect security etc. but the trade off could make sense.
It seems the boxes themselves aren't so bad, but when your stuff gets removed by accident and sent off to a warehouse there is a much higher chance of loss. The warehouse seems to be the problem, even though the packages are inventoried before being sent out.
They are fine. They are 100% convenience and nothing more. The only thing is (much like a yubi key), you need the key, you can only access it during banking hours, and generally requires an ID. So I fail to see how this is bad. It's far cheaper and easier than buying a garbage $300 safe that someone can jack open with a crowbar.
The shittiest thing is if a teller messes up and just let's someone who stole your key from your box, you're SOL. It's like the scene in Casino where De Niro's wife is clearing out the box. The bank manager couldn't stop her cause legally he had to let her in.
California seized many thousands of bank "Safe Deposit" boxes as being "unattended" during a fiscal crisis a decade+ ago. It caused a lot of commotion in certain legal circles, but was not in the mainstream news much. (details on request)
Wow that is so messed up. I think why the bank settled for that one lady was because they just gave her valuables to the state without notifying her. The bank completely forgoed everything about ethics and likely couldn't tell a judge with a straight face "she was an inactive customer" when she has written documentation from them that she was. Also, California throwing that in the general fund? And people think democrats have their back? A democratic legislature enacted those policies to actively steal from their constituents even faster.
Why are you blaming democrats for civil asset forfeiture in 2008 in California? Arnold was governor at the time, he must have approved the executive action that consisted of the seizure.
Edit: not to mention that it was a Democrat, John Chiang, that took on the task of attempting to return the property. I'm not trying to paint democrats as good guys, but I don't know how this event could be used to paint them as bad.
>QUINN: Yes. We forget about retirement accounts, insurance policies, safe deposit boxes. When you forget about stuff like that, after a certain amount of time, the state is able to step in, take ownership of your unclaimed stuff and hold onto it until you can come and claim it.
If the fed's "A-team" is getting into these kinds of messes then what does that say for all the B-rate agencies (AFT, DEA, etc) that get all the people who couldn't get jobs at the flagship agencies?
Edit: Removed comment unnecessarily insulting to ugly strippers
That's fine by me, I like it when cops have to follow the same laws as the rest of us. If one of us wanted to fuck around with grenades, we'd have to do the paperwork for each one. Why should that rule be any different for the police?
I don't like it when police get exempted from these laws. Why are they allowed to buy post-86 machine guns? The rest of us have to buy machine guns registered prior to 1986 or get a machine gun manufacturing license. Pre-86 machine guns are very expensive at auctions, but since the police are exempt from this they are allowed to buy comparably dirt-cheap machine guns brand new. Make the same rules apply to them, and if that means they can no longer afford machine guns, so be it. And all the better if that excess paperwork stops them from using grenades too.
It's a life-saving grenade that produces a 180-190dB shockwave and flash, incapacitating bad guys for a few moments. It's misclassified as a 'high-explosive ordnance', even though it produces no shrapnel and can safely go off at your feet.
If there's anyone that's time-proven competent at tactical equipment handling, it's law enforcement. It's sad to see the guys on the frontlines denied equipment when soldiers can fire $50k missiles at mud huts and request air support. This is coming from a 2A supporter.
If it's truly for a life-saving purpose then a little bit of paperwork shouldn't stop them from using it.
And you might think it's sad, but I'm not shedding a single tear for the police who don't have access to $50k missiles and air support. This too, is coming from a 2A supporter.
> "If there's anyone that's time-proven competent at tactical equipment handling, it's law enforcement"
This in particular is a strange claim. Most cops spend the bare minimum time at gun ranges that is required of them. If there is anyone that is well trained with any sort of grenade, I expect it to be soldiers not police officers. And on that note:
> Methods: Ten years of data were extracted from Dallas Police Department records. LEOs who were involved in a shooting in the past 10 years were frequency matched on sex to LEOs never involved in a shooting. Military discharge records were examined to quantify veteran status and deployment(s). Multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate the effect of veteran status and deployment history on officer-involved shooting involvement.
> Results: Records were abstracted for 516 officers. In the adjusted models, veteran LEOs who were not deployed were significantly more likely to be involved in a shooting than non-veteran officers. Veterans with a deployment history were 2.9 times more likely to be in a shooting than non-veteran officers.
> Conclusions: Military veteran status, regardless of deployment history, is associated with increased odds of shootings among LEOs. Future studies should identify mechanisms that explain this relationship, and whether officers who experienced firsthand combat exposure experience greater odds of shooting involvement.
No, that's not what I meant at all.... I don't want an officer explaining his 'fear for life' serving a simple seatbelt ticket, because we can't have $50 aliexpress drones flying to my window instead. I don't want no-knock raids to still be a thing in 2021 when you can easily scout the entire house with IR and know nobody can escape.
I want police to have access to simple technology without crappy paperwork. I want most influential civilian paper work like silencer tax stamps and the NFA to be invalidated, too. It makes no sense.
How is that $50 drone hovering next to my face going to breatherlizer me to see if I'm drunk? Will I have to put my face next to the rotor blades? And if the drone thinks I'm drunk, will the drone pull me out of the car before I speed off and run over some kid? Can the drone wrestle me into handcuffs?
I don't think technology is the solution to these problems. Not this sort of technology anyway. At the end of the day police will still have to physically interact with suspected criminals. And in America, where common people often own guns, that means risking their lives. But just how risky is it actually? I think we need more training to put these risks into perspective. The odds of any particular cop ever getting shot are quite low, but cops who consume cop media on cop websites and hang out on cop facebook groups or other cop echo chambers created by social media algorithms will naturally be exposed to more headlines about cops getting hurt. I believe these fear-mongering echo chambers induce an unjustified level of fear in the police officers who participate in them. Giving the police more high tech toys won't assuage these irrational fears; if anything I think it will might validate those fears. If you're a well-meaning cop who spends half your weekend watching videos of police in shootouts with criminals, then on monday your boss gives you a bunch of high tech body armor and drones, wouldn't that validate your perception of having an exceptionally dangerous job?
> I want most influential civilian paper work like silencer tax stamps and the NFA to be invalidated, too.
Here we agree, particularly with respect to silencers, which are safety devices. But for as long as those laws exist for the common people, I oppose police having exemptions to them.
Okay, that happened when the flashbang fell inside the baby's crib. Yes, dramatic. Bad. Ugly. Horrible. Waco fires could also have been started by flashbangs because of the plentiful carpets. But these devices provide a buffer for reaction times.
If all else fails, the officer has to explain in detail why he shot an unarmed man holding his eyes in pain, "in the heat of the moment".
There’s a whole lot of over simplified premise in this thought process. I’ll start here: If there's anyone that's time-proven competent at tactical equipment handling, it's law enforcement
Sheesh
Police aren’t well trained.
Because of this when they use any lethal or non lethal device innocent bystanders are frequently hurt maimed and even killed, especially when police use flash bangs.
Having property the feds can't easily seize sounds like something only criminals would want (after all, I'm an honest citizen- I got nothing to hide, surely a bank would be safer than my home) up until it happens to you.
You'll be amazed how quickly odd bedfellows kicks in when you really consider that a police force by definition is essentially a socially sanctioned criminal organization.
We have proof that law enforcement can:
-Steal from you. (Civil Asset forfeiture, no warrant required)
-Apply excessive force with good odds of not having to explain themselves.
-Lie to your face.
-kidnap you
-Utilize illegal/unconstitutional investigation techniques, then launder the evidence through parallel construction.
We also have proof that LE is nowhere near as good or thorough as they should be regulating themselves.
The "I have nothing to hide" is spoken like someone who has never been on the wrong side of an automated, impersonal system before. It'sall fun and games and justifiable until it's you caught in the civil rights blast crater.
I'd prefer no one ended up as collateral damage. It is better criminals go free than innocents get caught in dragnets.
By definition the police is a group of citizens employed to protect life and property, and bring law breaking individuals to the justice system. But if they are allowed to do what they want they don't care about definitions.
Law enforcement enforces laws. If they correctly do so, then their actions are not criminal. You may not like the laws theu enforce, but the way to address that is not to abolish LE, but to fix the law.
The law doesn't matter when cops either don't know the law themselves or willfully and knowingly break the law because they know they'll get away with it.
For example, the Supreme Court has ruled that you have a Constitutional right to record the police, and yet, some police are still trying to arrest people for recording them.
They shouldn't be above the laws they enforce, yet they typically are (e.g. qualified immunity). I agree with one thing though, the solution is not to abolish LE, but just as with asset seizure which is what TFA was about, checks and balances should be in place and should work properly.
Admittedly it was rather snarky, but the main takeaways remain the same: don't use safe deposit boxes and don't make it trivial to get your assets seized.
I guess. In this case it's happening to a bunch of rich folks in Beverly Hills (literally) buying boxes from a seemingly-shady places called "US Private Vaults" (vs. say, the Wells Fargo down the street) that in fact appears to be under legitimate investigation.
My "cry me a river" reflex is twitching hard, sorry. Reason is silent for decades as cops everywhere snatch property from minorities, but they decide to take a stand for their rich donors[1]? Ugh.
[1] Per the article, the victim was a supporter. I'm not making this up. At least they disclosed it, I guess.
we've got other articles in this thread explaining how fewer and fewer local banks are offering safe deposit boxes, and they generally want out of the business. and indeed, how when they exit the business, they ship your stuff to a warehouse in alaska and lose it.
so the business which does nothing but rent safe deposit boxes actually sounds like the reasonable place to do business with.
> Reason is silent for decades as cops everywhere snatch property from minorities
so you wouldn't mind if the feds just seized your stored wealth?
note, being a citizen in good standing with the law does not necessarily prevent this from happening.
I don't understand why you would want it to be easy for your property to be seized.
Lastly, the "I got nothing to hide" argument is a fallacy - as Snowden has said, it is analogous to being against freedom of speech because you have nothing to say.
The article doesn't address a significant issue, when the FBI executed their warrants and shut down the private vault company, what should they have done with any stored boxes not named in the warrant? Left them in an unguarded building with no legal way for the owners to access them?
Serious question: how do you do that when the organization running the boxes was selling anonymized services?
There's a Vice News article on this same event that's been shared elsewhere in the comment thread, and that article includes an advertisement the company put out:
The company is openly marketing itself as refusing any form of identification in order to provide total anonymity. Aside from the one user who claims they added identifying data to the exterior of the box, how do you propose identifying the owner of an otherwise-featureless box without opening it?
You post a public notice saying where the deposit boxes are being held at the original physical location, the company's web site, the local papers, and any other likely locations. If anyone shows up claiming to own one of the boxes you follow the same authentication procedures the original custodian would have used. Then you leave them in private to unlock the box and remove their property. At no point during the claims process should the temporary custodian attempt to open any of the boxes or observe their contents, as that would be abusing their power to search presumably innocent parties outside the scope of the warrant.
If sufficient time (decades, at least) passes without any claim after proper notice is given, the property can be considered abandoned. At that point someone may attempt to open the box by force.
>Howard tells Reason there was no attempt made by the FBI to contact him, his wife, or their heirs—despite the fact that contact information was taped to the top of their box.
The article doesn't say if all of the boxes are marked in the same way, but at least that one was.
To me, there’s also the question of how the box was marked — safety deposit boxes have a locking outer door and a removable insert that can have a second lock on it. I would be shocked if USPV allowed this customer to post any identifying data on the outer door, and I haven’t seen a report either way on whether or not the FBI was allowed to open the outer door to access the insert if that’s where the label was placed.
For what it’s worth, the original article is pretty awful — it provides only one perspective (that of a wronged customer), didn’t mention if the author contacted the FBI for comment, and also didn’t mention that the FBI was authorized to seize the “vaults” of boxes, but not granted the right to open the boxes themselves. Most of this is mentioned in other media reports, and in total paints this story very differently: USPV was involved with wrongdoing, there is a high likelihood that some boxes contain evidence of further crimes, but there will need to be some court-appointed team that has to go through the boxes in order to uncover this evidence while protecting all the other owners (and their identities) from the FBI.
There’s a lot that worries me the these days. Covid, global warming, inflation. But nothing worries me more than the cultivated disinterest and lack of knowledge in American civil liberties in our country.
People should read this story and see it as a brazen abuse of your 4th amendment rights. It should be upsetting, and worrying.
It seems that our liberty is under attack on almost every front. The “speech is literally violence” crew, those that cheer the abuse of state surveillance because the target is a political enemy, and the “blue lives matter” crew who close their eyes to police tactics that are literally killing innocence people.
These civil liberties are not additive qualities to the American constitution. They’re foundational elements that can’t be removed without a collapse.
> [civil liberties are] foundational elements that can’t be removed without a collapse
By and large, civil liberties as defined haven't been removed. They've been superseded by higher levels of structure, because the Bill of Rights was narrowly framed as only applying restrictions to the bona fide "government".
The modern censorship movement is focused on tech middlemen, which as the refrain goes, are "private companies". Freedom from state surveillance wasn't laid out in the founding documents (although the spirit is there), but even so the state is just buying cooperative access from third parties - qualitatively "the state" is best seen as including Equifax, Lexis-Nexis, Google, etc, but legally they're "private companies". And criminal police are independent conspiracies that the state has simply decided to do nothing about, akin to (and seemingly descended from) historical lynching + jury nullification.
I don't necessarily know what a productive synthesis is, besides that legal fundamentalism won't get us anywhere. The problem is not straightforward decay, but rather a foundational framework that is increasingly inapplicable.
The benefit of cryptocurrencies is that you can use a multisig solution so the compromise of one storage location doesn't cause your stash to become compromised.
Uhh... wouldn't you password protect the volume and have multiple copies in different safety deposit boxes, offsite vaulting-type providers, and a couple of hidden places too?
Somethings like large amounts of money are worth the trouble to secure.
I always assumed safe deposit boxes are the best way to store valuables. But I've seen a few incidents of banks getting robbed successfully in the last few years, including one near me, and then there is the potential for violations of civil liberties like this. Is there a better alternative? Are home safes actually anything more than cosmetic?
>According to the DEA, the company encouraged drug dealers to stash controlled substances in its safe deposit boxes, advised its customers on how to avoid government scrutiny, used a nearby gold business to help its customers launder money, and facilitated drug deals inside the business.
>To access the vaults, customers had to use an iris and hand print scanner. The keys they used to open their vaults were unmarked so the employees and law enforcement couldn’t know which key goes to which vault. "Since we don't know your name we can't provide information on your box to anyone,” Steven Gregory, prescient of U.S. Private Vaults, said in a 2012 commercial.
>In retrospect, U.S. Private Vaults’ advertisements are telling. “I’ve heard horror stories about individuals who have lost everything when their bank safe deposit box was frozen due to court order or a tax lien,” an actor said in one commercial. “At U.S. Private Vaults, I never have to worry about anything like that. My personal information is never shared or stored in a big bank computer system.”
>“Employees of defendant [U.S. Private Vaults] would conduct counter surveillance of the neighborhood and warn customers when they observed law enforcement,” the indictment said. If employees figured out the cops were on to them, “they would attempt to warn the customer, delay law enforcement, or even remove all but a nominal amount of cash from the box for the customer, to prevent law enforcement from discovering and seizing the bulk of the cash.”
Given all of the above, I can see why the FBI thought it needed to seize everything. As long as they are giving stuff back to their rightful owners, I don't see that much of a problem.
Okay, but unchecked what will happen is the heavy-handed defanging of the FBI rather than creating strong accountability, because it’s easier to defund (see IRS).
We’ve had four years (or really, 20 years) of deregulation. We already known it sucks.
Right now, it’s tax payers who are largely accountable for law enforcement officers who stretch or violate the law and constitution. And it doesn’t get much attention because most of us are unaffected (so far).
How do you maintain strong law enforcement at all levels—and make no mistake, we need it—but also maintain discipline?
If it's a significant sum you should speak to a lawyer, you may be able to claim those funds back from law enforcement. Liberty Reserve claims are seemingly being processed (after 7 years), I don't see why BTC-e would be treated very differently. If it's a very large amount, you could be able to negotiate a success-based fee where the lawyers will cost you nothing unless you get your money.
I think the vault company was storing illicit gains in the boxes and acting like they belonged to other anon private individuals (customers) so the FBI took them all and are awaiting the legitimate and illegitimate customers to claim the boxes to has it all out. Seems legally dubious but were they just to let them continue hiding behind their "customers?"
Whether the warrant should have been issued is one debate worth having. But the other problem is that the FBI didn't even follow the terms of the warrant.
If law enforcement (at every level) won't follow the law even in procedural matters, we're 100x worse off than most people thought.
A thoughtful person will also ask: "Wait, when did the FBI begin undertaking clearly illegal activity? What other investigations have been tainted as a result?"